Archive for December 22, 2022

Thursday, December 22, 2022

French Court Fines Apple Over Abusive App Store Practices

Reuters (via MacRumors):

The Paris Commercial Court on Monday fined iPhone maker Apple just over 1 million euros ($1.06 million) for imposing abusive commercial clauses on French app developers for access to the company’s App Store, the court ruling showed.

The ruling, seen by Reuters, said there was no need to order Apple, which has a market value of about $2.1 trillion, to tweak the App Store’s clauses because the European Union’s incoming Digital Markets Act would require changes in any case.

And the pricing complaint was just addressed as part of the Cameron settlement.

Previously:

Update (2022-12-23): Florian Mueller:

I have meanwhile obtained and perused a copy of the entire 30-part judgment by the Paris Commercial Court’s 13th Chamber (trade judges Alain Wormser (presiding judge), Gérard Palti, and Beatriz Rego Fernandez). There are other counts on which Apple prevailed, and which have not received enough attention. As a commentator on these cases, I can’t just ignore the unfavorable parts of a decision.

[…]

My overall impression of the decision is that the three-judge panel was simply not interested in tackling some of the more difficult questions, such as the fairness of Apple’s requirement that all in-app purchases use Apple’s IAP system and the app tax of 30% or more for developers of a certain size (and 15% or more for small ones).

Fixing the “Failed to Enable Personal Hotspot” Error

Thomas Tempelmann:

Some of my older Macs running High Sierra or Mojave were unable to join the Personal Hotspot of one or even two of my iPhones.

[…]

There is a file called com.apple.airport.preferences.plist in the folder /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration.

[…]

Delete this file. But that will also reset all your network interfaces[…]

[…]

If you’re more adept, edit the file, e.g. with the app PrefEdit or BBEdit, then find all entries that mention “phone”, and remove those. After saving the changes, you should be able to reconnect to the phone without even requiring a restart.

Problems With Instagram and Flickr Sites on iPad

Juli Clover:

As of iPadOS 16, some Instagram users who access the iPhone version of the app on their iPad have noticed that it’s not working properly on the iPad’s display, making it impossible to post stories, see the full content of images, access polls, and more.

[…]

Story text from others is cut off depending on the layout of an image, and there are graphical errors with interactive Instagram post elements like polls and text entry boxes.

Meanwhile, with Flickr, there is an iOS app that works on iPad, but its features are limited. I can access the desktop site in Safari, but only after cancelling out of an alert that tries to open the app. Even then it shows a Universal Links banner constantly. I can’t get drag and drop on the Organize page to work.

You’d think photo services would be an important use for iPads, but they don’t seem to be prioritizing it.

Previously:

Google Moves Maps to google.com

Garrit Franke:

I opened Google Maps again, and noticed that maps.google.com now redirects to google.com/maps. This implies that the permissions I give to Google Maps now apply to all of Googles services hosted under this domain. So far I only identified Google Flights to have made the same switch (google.com/flights), though I’m sure they’re just beginning to transfer their services to the main google.com domain.

Via John Gruber:

Grant location access to Google Maps now, and you grant it to all of Google.

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